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Class Conflict and Ideology in Faulkner's Sanctuary

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Class Conflict and Ideology in Faulkner's Sanctuary University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations Dissertations and Theses 1-20-2006 These People are Not Your People: Class Conflict and Ideology in Faulkner's Sanctuary Elizabeth Shaye Hope University of New Orleans Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td Recommended Citation Hope, Elizabeth Shaye, "These People are Not Your People: Class Conflict and Ideology in aulknerF 's Sanctuary" (2006). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. 315. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/315 This Thesis is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by ScholarWorks@UNO with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Thesis in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. This Thesis has been accepted for inclusion in University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UNO. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT YOUR PEOPLE:” CLASS CONFLICT AND IDEOLOGY IN FAULKNER’S SANCTUARY A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of the Arts in The Department of English by Elizabeth Shaye Hope B.A., University of Southern Mississippi, 2003 December 2005 Abstract According to William Faulkner’s assessment, the mixing of the classes fails because very different ideologies have emerged and are in competition and conflict with one another. The discourses and therefore the ideologies of the characters in Sanctuary are seen to be in conflict with one another, with persons on opposing sides occupying positions that seem to be growing further and further apart, making communication more and more difficult. In examining the speech and interactions of these characters, the codes and knowledge of the different value systems may be analyzed. Sanctuary, then, is not a novel merely about good and evil; it is a novel about the breakdown of southern antebellum ideology and the new set of relations that began to emerge in the early twentieth century. Social class and ideology are central issues in Sanctuary, and Faulkner’s novel demonstrates the ways in which class transgressions result in violence. ii The extraordinary power of William Faulkner’s early novels is at least partially due to the sound and the fury of competing voices, those voices dominant and the various others that whisper and resound throughout his fiction. Sanctuary, written and revised during the late 1920s and published in 1931, serves as a meeting place for the divergent voices present in the South during Prohibition as Faulkner understood them. In this novel, he represents the languages and the ideologies encoded in those languages at the precise moment of the South during Prohibition. The failed communication of the characters indicate that a meaningful discourse, one in which all parties can effectively communicate with one another, is impossible between people of different social classes, and that ideological differences exist even among persons of the same class. Part of Sanctuary’s importance lies in its representation of the voices of its time and these voices’ relationships to and conflicts with one another. Faulkner appropriates these languages and uses them to expose the intra-racial tensions and violence present among white Mississippians of the 1920s, ultimately presenting a grim and divisive view of a disconnected society. Sanctuary is a novel that depicts a society without ideals. According to Irving Howe’s classic critical study of William Faulkner’s fiction, the novel has been concerned historically with the differences in behavior between social classes that interact in organized society. The South of the early twentieth century in particular, because of the legacy of Reconstruction, faced “a social vacuum with a decay in traditional relationships and the absence of new workable ones” (8). For Faulkner, this “decay” lay primarily in the collapse of nineteenth-century white aristocratic paternalism, and Sanctuary in particular scrutinizes this ideological position. Though many southerners long embraced this social code, by the early twentieth century paternalism was declining. Moreover, those who had once been lower-class gained a measure of economic 1 mobility when Prohibition afforded them the opportunity to turn quick, large profits from the sale of alcohol. And yet, for persons like Faulkner, these bootleggers and others associated with this subculture did not embrace middle-class values. These persons resisted rather than acculturated to the dominant ideology of the old paternal order, preferring the idea of a “New South” to the myth of the old plantocracy that largely denied poor whites power. Sanctuary forcefully suggests that for Faulkner a mixing of the classes fails to blur class distinctions. Many theorists have taken up this discussion of language and ideology in the novel. One such theory is Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of discourse in the novel, which demonstrates the ways in which ideology becomes linguistically encoded in the novel. Such is the case in Sanctuary. Bakhtin defines the novel as “a diversity of social speech types, sometimes even diversity of languages and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (262). The novel thus represents the modes of discourse present in the particular cultural moment of the society that produces the novel. Many factors shape discourse, Bakhtin argues, not least of which is social class. A central point in his theory of discourse is that “in any given historical moment of verbal- ideological life, each generation at each social level has its own language; moreover, every age group has as a matter of fact its own language, its own vocabulary, its own particular accentual system” (290). He defines language not “as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view” (271). Furthermore, he argues, “The prose art presumes a deliberate feeling for the historical and social concreteness of living discourse, as well as its relativity, a feeling for its participation in historical becoming and in social struggle, it deals with discourse that is still warm from that struggle and hostility, as yet unresolved and still fraught with hostile intentions and accents” (331). Implied is an understanding of the novel as a raw, unprocessed, and unfiltered genre. As a 2 result, the distinguishing feature of the novel is its heteroglossia, the divergent and competing voices of the society that produces a particular novel, “a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships” (263). Every layer of speech in the novel reflects the accents of different social elements of the era and culture that produced the novel, and while an author may manipulate language, he or she will use the languages available in his or her particular socio-historical moment. Thus, according to Bakhtin, language is an ideological construct, and whether spoken or transmitted through nonverbal cues, language indicates the ideological position of the speaker. Although he concedes that literary language is frequently the language of a dominant social group, he argues that “there is nevertheless present, even here, a certain degree of social differentiation, a social stratification” (290) Furthermore, the action, like the speech of the characters, “is always highlighted by ideology[,] is associated with an ideological motif and occupies a definite ideological position” (334). Thus the various languages and discourses, whether represented through interior monologues, narrated monologue, or dialogue between characters, as well as the actions of characters, are cues to the ideologies represented within a text. For Bakhtin, the novel is polyphonic, and, though a dominant group may seek to establish unitary language indicative of a world view that privileges that group, voices of dissent are present in the consciousness of the author and thus present in the novel. Bakhtin’s ideas about the novel and its relationships within ideology are, of course, open for critique, and many persons see these ideas as reductive, arguing that Bakhtin diminishes the author to a passive recorder rather than an active manipulator of language. Nevertheless, his theory is useful in examining ideology at work in the novel. Viewing Sanctuary through Bakhtin’s definition of the novel allows one to consider Faulkner’s own voice and ideological 3 position as one of many that make up the dialogic speech of the novel. Locating Faulkner’s ideology is less important than examining relationships between the various classed voices he represents, for though his own political stance may color his representation of anothers’, by appropriating the language of the “other,” by placing various languages in the mouths of different characters, Faulkner can draw various discourses into conflict with one another. In Sanctuary, entrenched but fading paternalism conflicts with the competing ideologies of the “New South.” Characters do not share values or knowledge, and they inhabit social worlds that, despite their physical proximity, are largely
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